How much does a video capture card or NDI encoder cost?

We don't publish a price list — pricing depends on the model, the volume, and whether you're buying as a trade or end-user account — but the question of "roughly what am I looking at" is fair, so here's what actually drives the cost up or down.

Interface is the biggest single factor. A USB capture card is the cheapest way into video capture — it leans on a PC you already own to do the streaming or recording, so the device itself only needs to handle signal conversion. A standalone hardware encoder costs more because it's doing the job a whole PC would otherwise do, packed into a single box with no PC required at all.

Resolution and format support. 1080p-only hardware sits at the lower end, 4K support moves things up, and HDR/multi-format flexibility (multiple input types, multiple simultaneous outputs) moves it up further. This is usually the most direct lever: spending more here typically buys you genuine future-proofing rather than just a label.

Protocol support. A device that only does NDI is simpler — and usually cheaper — than one that does NDI, SRT, RTMP and RIST simultaneously with hardware failover between them. If you only need one protocol, paying for support for three others you'll never use is the easiest place to overspend.

Channel count. Multi-channel devices (dual or quad input on one card, or multiview decoders handling several streams at once) cost more than single-channel equivalents, but usually work out cheaper per channel than buying several single-channel units to do the same job.

Volume and account type. Trade and reseller accounts get meaningfully different pricing from list, and multi-unit deployments (a few units vs. a fifty-unit rollout) change the conversation considerably. This is exactly why we quote rather than publish a price list — a fair number for one buyer often isn't the right number for another.